The Duchess of Cambridge dressed in Alexander McQueen on her wedding day is projected onto the wall, amid swaying union flags, at the V&A's spring exhibition, which opens next week.

But, the show, Wedding Dress 1775-2014, is a democratic affair.

Gowns worn by merchants' daughters take their place beside those of flower sellers; the matching suit and dress worn by a Ghanaian couple share display space with Kate Moss's John Galliano dress from her wedding to Jamie Hince in 2011.

In putting together 239 years of wedding fashion, explains Edwina Ehrman, a V&A curator, "I wanted the exhibition to involve ordinary people, not just weddings we've seen before." The exhibition begins in the late 18th century, when cream and white was the dominant colour scheme. "The first thing people want to know is when white became the choice of colour for brides. White was a very elitist colour, you needed a large wardrobe to encompass a gown you would rarely wear and that was hard to clean. When you get to the 20th century white becomes more affordable and so colour becomes fashionable. More fashionable women often look to colour, particularly in the 1920s when they wore gold and lamé fabrics. In the 1930s, the Duchess of Windsor's 'Wallis blue' dress was incredibly influential." Veils, Ehrman says, became fashionable in evening wear in the 18th century, when Britain displayed an interest in antiquity, spurred on by the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum. They were adopted by brides in the 1820s to mirror French women, who began wearing them for Roman Catholic ceremonies.

The most striking section of the exhibition, which has been seen by a quarter of a million people in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore and returns to the V&A, where some of the gowns were first shown in London in 1981, occurs when the visitor ascends the staircase and reaches the modern day. Floral projections dance across the ceiling and Dita Von Teese's huge purple wedding dress into view, although she was beaten to it by Harriet Joyce of Middlesex in 1899, who eschewed white because she felt she was too old for the traditional hue. She was 35.

These later dresses are the most diverse, such as Sandy Liberson's silver-lined spaceman-like jacket and dress from 1966, or Lady Mary Charteris's 2012 dress by Pam Hogg, notable for its flesh-baring bodice. Charteris was fortunate to have her husband Robbie Furze's approval – Lisa Butcher's cutaway gown from her 1992 wedding to Marco Pierre White caused the groom to pronounce: "It was wrong for the occasion. I think a woman should dress only for the man she is marrying." The marriage, the caption notes, was short-lived.

With approximately 234,000 marriages taking place in the UK each year and couples spending over £22,000 on average, according to the National Wedding Show, this is not an industry to be sniffed at. Since 2008, Ehrman points out, designers who previously turned their noses up began to put out bridal collections in an attempt to tap into a guaranteed market post-financial crash. "Social media allows couples to not only to plan their wedding with greater detail, such as mood boards on Pinterest, but to publicly document every single process, from the engagement to the honeymoon," says Alex Butler, of the National Wedding Show. "But really, the royal wedding has a lot to answer for. It popularised a certain look."

Ehrman is adamant that the exhibition, which doesn't feature any royal gowns, is not about Wills and Kate. "I wanted to feature the video of the royal wedding because of the sounds and emotions it conveys. The cheering and the church bells evoke a certain Britishness. It that sense, it could be anyone. It's a sound that immediately tells you there is a wedding."